The Winchester Sisters
by Isobel Morgan
Summary: What would Supernatural have been like if it had been about sisters instead of brothers? The pilot episode rebooted for this concept, as discussed in some online forums.
1. Chapter 1

As discussed in various online forums etc, this is an attempt to see how the show would have worked with female leads; that is to say, if it had always been intended to be about two sisters, not "Sam and Dean with tits".

I haven't included the teaser because it wouldn't really be any different, compared with the rest of it; I've attempted not to just write out the pilot with 'she' instead of 'he' and girl's names. The basic characters are the same, although there are differences, some subtle, some more obvious.

**The Winchester Girls**

**1.**

Alexis Winchester finished brushing out her short blonde hair and stared at herself in the mirror, wondering whether she really had to go through with this.

"Lex!" a voice bellowed from the next room; Dylan, her boyfriend of the past year, was getting impatient.

"Lex, get a move on would you? We were supposed to be there like 15 minutes ago. Alex! Are you coming or what?"

There was a laugh in his voice at her reticence, but she knew she couldn't put this off any longer and left the bathroom.

"Do I have to?"

She pulled a pouty face in the hope of putting him off the idea, but he just laughed and cupped her face in his hands.

"Yes. I keep telling you. It. Will. Be. Fun. And where's your costume?"

He looked over her denim skirt, Converse sneakers and star print t-shirt.

Dylan himself was dressed as a Zombie from 'Shaun of the Dead', complete with a vinyl record taped to his neck, as if someone had tried to decapitate him with it and it had gotten stuck. Despite the lashings of fake blood, he looked adorable.

"You know how I feel about Halloween," Alex told him.

"_But not why_," she thought to herself, and to avoid following up that thought, she let Dylan take her to the party.

It was rammed, like all campus parties she'd ever been to, and Alex found herself talking to a bunch of people she sort-of knew, people she'd shared courses with, friends of Dylan's. This guy, however, she was pretty sure she'd never seen before, but Dylan seemed happy enough to include him in the conversation. Or perhaps it was just that he was so proud of her he wanted to tell everyone, which was sort of cute but more than a little embarrassing.

Right now, he was offering up a toast.

"So here's to Alex and her awesome LSAT victory."

Alex winced a little.

"Alright, alright, it's not that big a deal."

Dylan put his spare arm around her and gave her a squeeze.

"She acts all humble but she scored a 174."

The guy, who'd clearly started partying a whole lot earlier than they had, squinted as he tried to work that out.

"Is that good?"

"Scary good," Dylan informed him, which didn't exactly make Alex any more comfortable. But she loved him, and she'd put up with much worse from people she cared about in the past. She tried to concentrate on the conversation in hand, rather than letting her mind wander.

"Great! So you can go to any law school you want," the guy was saying.

Alex smiled.

"Actually I got an interview here on Monday. If it goes ok, I think I got a shot at a full ride next year."

Dylan gave her another squeeze.

"Hey, it's gonna go great."

"It better."

Alex didn't want to spoil the evening anymore by being negative, but this was important in so many ways. Nameless Friend was still talking in that overly familiar way of drunks.

"How does it feel to be the golden child in your family, then?"

So much for not spoiling the evening.

"Ah, they don't know."

The guy's eyes widened in what was perhaps a bit of an overreaction.

"Don't know? I would be gloating! Why not?"

Alex tried not to give the honest answer to that, which was that she thought her dad and sister would be too busy chasing demons to give a rat's ass about some LSAT score, to put it mildly.

"Cause we're not exactly the Brady's."

The guy snorted.

"And I'm not exactly the Huxtables. More shots?"

Yeah, more vodka, that'd fix it.

"No, thanks."

Dylan put down his beer and gave her a hug, but carefully so as not to spoil his costume or cover her in fake blood.

"Seriously, Lex. I'm proud of you, babe. You're gonna knock 'em dead on Monday and you're gonna get that full ride. I know it."

Alex felt herself relax, wrapping her arms around him, letting her happiness seep in. OK, so it was some stupid Hallowe'en party where people thought it was fun to dress up like the things she knew all too well were real, but it wasn't like she was the only one with family issues. Dylan's dad had died when Dylan was in his teens, and her freshman dorm-mate Rachel had grown up with a violent alcoholic mother. Somehow Alex doubted that the reason for a parent's alcoholism being a little more domestic than demon-related trauma made it any easier to deal with when your mom knocked you about your whole childhood.

And her past was behind her; she was here now, she had her guy, and she had a real chance of the future she'd been dreaming of.

"What would I do without you?" she asked, sighing.

"Crash and burn!" Dylan announced happily, and kissed her.

Later that night, Alex was woken abruptly from a contented sleep by a sudden crash from the room next door. Instantly alert, she rolled out of bed, leaving Dylan sleeping, and snuck out the door.

Was someone trying to break into their apartment? And that was assuming it was 'someone' and not 'something'. Trying to stay calm, keeping her breathing shallow, Alex followed the shadow she glimpsed heading for the kitchen, and pounced.

The shadow fought back. Alex found her limbs responding to a fight situation almost automatically, but despite that, she was rusty after two years or so off the scene and the figure quickly pinned her to the floor.

"Easy there, tiger," her attacker declared, long black hair brushing Alex's face and Alex couldn't believe what she was seeing.

"_Tara_?"

Her older sister laughed and Alex didn't know whether to be relieved or furious.

"You scared the crap out of me!"

"That's 'cos you're out of practice." Tara sounded smug, and Alex found fury winning. Twisting her hips, she flung her sister off of her, flipping so that she was the one doing the pinning now.

But Tara was still laughing.

"Or not…Get off me, little sister."

Alex got to her feet, adjusting her sleep shorts.

"T, what the hell are you doing here?"

Her sister got up too, and Alex noticed she was dressed in her usual uniform of jeans, tight vest top and shirt, but thankfully not her heavy black boots, which would easily have put the fight in her favour over bare-footed Alex.

"Well," Tara replied, shaking out her hair.

"I _was_ looking for a beer, but you don't seem to have any. Don't tell me the guy you've shacked up with doesn't drink?"

Alex raised her eyebrows.

"I'm not sure what's more offensive – your idea that a guy has to have a fridge full of beer to be a real man or that I wouldn't buy it myself."

"Okay, alright." Tara held up her hands as if surrendering.

"I came here 'cos we gotta talk."

"Uh, heard of the phone?" Alex replied, incredulous.

Tara snorted.

"If I'd have called, would you have picked up?"

They were interrupted from any more sisterly bonding by the light flipping on as a confused Dylan came in, his dark hair rumpled from sleep.

"Alex?"

"Hey, babe."

Alex found she was a little embarrassed by the situation.

"Um, Tara, this is my boyfriend Dylan."

Dylan, squinting without his glasses, blinked unadjusted eyes at the stranger in the room.

"Tara? As in, your sister Tara?"

The sister in question was eyeing bare-chested Dylan in a way that made the fury rise up in Alex again, but she kept a lid on it. For now.

"I love the Smurfs," Tara smirked.

What?

Then Alex realised that Dylan was wearing the novelty boxer shorts his brother had given him for Christmas the previous year. Trust Tara to notice _that_ first of all.

"You know I gotta tell you," Tara continued, still staring at Dylan in a way that suggested, in a Tara turn of phrase, that she wanted to 'bang him like a drum'.

"You are completely out of my sister's league."

This time it took more effort to control the wave of pissed-off-ness. Alex was well aware of what other girls thought of Dylan, who fit nicely into the 'hot geek' category, had gotten used to girls openly flirting with him even when she was right there next to him, but, other than being a guy who breathed, Dylan was _so_ not Tara's type. He was a science nerd working on a chemistry MSc and, well, to say that Tara liked bad boys was an understatement.

"Um, just let me get dressed."

Dylan turned to go back into the bedroom, but Tara, grabbing hold of Alex's arm, stopped him.

"No, no, I wouldn't dream of it…Seriously. Anyway, I gotta borrow your lady here, talk about some private family business, but, uh, nice meeting you."

This didn't help the rage, and Alex found herself saying:

"No, whatever you wanna say you can say it in front of him."

Tara raised her eyebrows and dragged her attention away from Dylan long enough to focus on her younger sister.

"Okay. Um…Dad hasn't been home in a few days."

This was what Tara has come all this way for? Wasn't like that had never happened before, and Alex had worked hard to try and distance herself from her family's problems.

"So he's working over-time on a "Miller Time" shift," she replied, dismissively.

"He'll stumble back in sooner or later."

But Tara was giving her a very direct look.

"Dad's on a _hunting_ trip and he hasn't been home in a few days."

The penny dropped.

"Excuse us, Dylan. We have to go outside."

Alex hustled her sister out the door and down the stairs before her boyfriend could question their exchange, keeping her voice low.

"What the hell, Tara? I mean, come on; you can't just break in, in the middle of the night, and expect me to hit the road with you."

"You're not hearing me, Lexie. Dad's _missing_; I need you to help me find him."

The underlying anger bubbling in Alex's stomach stopped her noticing the note of definite worry in her sister's voice.

"You remember the poltergeist in Amherst, or the devil's gates in Clifton? He was missing then too, he's always missing and he's always fine."

But Tara persisted, turning back to face her sister on the stairs.

"Not for this long. Now you gonna come with me or not?"

Alex folded her arms, hardening her heart.

"Not."

"Why?"

Alex let out an exasperated sigh; wasn't it obvious?

"When I came out here to college, I swore I was done hunting for good."

"Oh, come on," Tara scoffed. "It wasn't easy, but it wasn't _that_ bad."

Not that bad? Alex thought. Was she remembering the same thing? A hundred or more memories sprang up in her mind and she picked the one she felt most illustrated her point.

"Yeah? When I told Dad when I was scared of the thing in my closet," Alex reminded her sister.

"He gave me a .45!"

Tara didn't rise to this.

"Well, what was he supposed to do?"

"I was nine years old! Dads are supposed to tell their kids not to be afraid of the dark."

Tara rolled her eyes, opening the door to the street.

"Don't be afraid of the dark? What are you kidding me? Of course you should be afraid of the dark! You know what's out there!"

Alex tried not to let in the deluge of memories that accusation released.

"Yeah I know," she admitted.

"But still - the way we grew up after Mom died; Dad's obsession with finding the thing that killed her. We still haven't found the damn thing, so, what we're just supposed to kill everything we can find?"

"Works for me. We save a lot of people doing it, too."

Tara sounded proud of that, which was fair enough; she was a damn good hunter, but that wasn't what Alex meant.

"That's not the point. I want to help people too; that's why I'm working toward being a defence lawyer, not some vigilante with a shotgun full of rock salt."

Tara opened her mouth, no doubt with some smart-assed reply in mind, but Alex overrode her.

"You think Mom would have wanted this for us? Instead of playing with Barbie dolls and braiding each other's hair, we were learning exorcisms in Latin and melting silver into bullets before we'd finished elementary school. We didn't have a childhood; we were raised to be soldiers."

This time it was Tara who got angry; this wasn't going the way she wanted, although she'd known before coming to Stanford Alex wouldn't exactly be thrilled to see her.

"That what you wanted? To be just like everyone else? That why you're pretending you can live some normal, apple-pie life?"

Alex sighed.

"No. Not normal. Just – less crazy. Safe."

Tara still couldn't understand, even after all this time.

"And that's why you ran away?"

Her choice of words was deliberate; another accusation to fling at her sister. Two years wasn't long enough for the bitterness of their parting to have faded.

Alex didn't rise to it; if anything, her anger seemed to be decreasing as Tara's increased.

"I just wanted to go to college, like millions of other kids. It was Dad who said if I was gonna go, I should stay gone, remember? So that's what I'm doing."

Tara did her best to shove aside the emotional baggage associated with that old argument, to focus on the matter in hand.

"Yeah well Dad's in real trouble if he's not dead already, I can feel it."

She couldn't keep the worry from her voice.

"I can't do this alone."

Alex raised her eyebrows.

"Yes you can."

"Yeah. Well, I don't want to," Tara snapped and Alex relented.

"Alright. What was he hunting?"

Tara led her across the parking lot of the apartment block to the black Chevrolet Impala parked rather incongruously there, popping the trunk. Alex felt her past almost physically catching up with her at the sight of the family car and it only got worse as Tara revealed all the guns, knives and associated crap hidden beneath the false floor, searching through them.

"Now, where the hell did I put that thing?"

"So when Dad left, why didn't you go with him?" Alex asked, genuinely curious.

If there was one phrase to sum Tara up, it was 'Daddy's Girl.' Maybe not in the conventional sense - they didn't have the easiest of relationships - but she'd practically been his shadow since she was out of diapers. Tara didn't seem to notice this aspect of Alex's question.

"I was working my own gig," she replied, still rummaging in the trunk, almost dismissive of what she was imparting.

"This voodoo thing down in New Orleans."

Alex was taken aback.

"Dad let you go on a hunting trip by yourself?"

She hadn't thought that would ever happen. Not so much because John Winchester was so protective of his daughters he wouldn't risk them taking on something alone, but because she could practically hear his voice in her head nixing the idea because 'you'd just screw it up without me there.'

No matter how capable the sisters proved themselves to be, how hard they worked, studied, fought; neither could remember their dad ever telling them he was proud of them. Not when Alex made the Honor Roll, or when Tara came first in the sprint event of a State Track and Field competition, or made the gymnastics team only a week into transferring to yet another different school. Not even when they started accompanying their father on hunts, saving his ass on more than one occasion.

The closest Alex had ever gotten to making her father proud was when she'd been suspended from school – she forgot which one – at age fifteen for breaking the jaw of some guy who'd tried to cop a feel.

John had chewed her out, of course, for drawing attention to herself, for the trip he had to make to the Principal's office, but he'd also given her a sideways look that was as close as he ever came to saying she'd done well. Tara had been less subtle, and celebrated Alex's moment by sneaking them both into a bar and teaching her pool; possibly the most normal family moment they'd had in years.

Tara gave her baby sister a look.

"I'm not a kid, Lex. I'm twenty-six."

She finally found what she was looking for, tugging a book out from under a heap of ammo boxes and extracting a newspaper clipping, which she handed to Alex.

"Alright, here we go. So Dad was checking out this two-lane blacktop outside of Jericho, California. About a month ago this girl disappeared. They found her car but she'd vanished, completely M.I.A."

Alex skimmed the article, but couldn't see the touch of anything supernatural in it.

"So? Maybe she was kidnapped."

Tara handed her a second clipping, then a third and Alex felt herself going cold, and not just because she was outside in her pyjamas in the middle of an October night.

"Yeah well, here's another one in April; another one in December '04, '03, '98, '92. Ten of them over the past 20 years, all girls, all same 5-mile stretch of road. Started happening more and more so Dad went to go dig around. That was about three weeks ago. I hadn't heard from him since, which is bad enough."

Tara pulled her cell phone out from a pocket in her travelling bag.

"Then I get this voicemail yesterday."

Alex hadn't heard her father's voice in years, and despite everything, she felt a pang go through her as the voicemail started up.

"Tara, something is starting to happen," John's recorded voice said.

"I think it's serious. I need to try to figure out what's going on."

A wave of static obscured his next sentence.

"Be very careful, Tara, we're all in danger."

The message ended, and Alex realised what the static was.

"There's EVP on that, isn't there?"

Tara grinned.

"Not bad, Lexie. Kind of like riding a bike isn't it? So, I slowed the message down, ran it through a Gold Wave to take out the hiss, and this is what I got."

She replayed the message, but this time a different man's voice could clearly be heard.

"_I can never go home_."

Alex let this sink in, knowing that now she'd let it get this far she had to see it to the end now. So much for a nice weekend with Dylan.

Tara slammed the trunk shut again, her anger flaring up again.

"You know in almost two years I've never bothered you. Never asked you for a thing."

She'd tried her hardest to keep a lid on her temper, but it was getting more and more difficult. It wasn't like Tara hadn't had ideas of her own about leaving – at age seventeen, she'd voiced the idea to her father of signing up, getting some extra combat experience, but he'd shot that down in an instant, and Tara had, reluctantly, agreed. Hunting was the family business, and she was a part of it.

Why didn't Alex get that?

Alex brushed her hair back from her face and let out a sigh.

"Alright. I'll go. I'll help you find him, as long as I get back by first thing Monday. Just wait here."

She turned to go back inside, but Tara stopped her.

"What's first thing Monday?"

"I have this…I have an interview."

Alex didn't want to elaborate, but Tara kept pushing.

"What, a job interview? Skip it."

"It's not a job interview, it's a law-school interview, and it's my whole future on a plate."

Alex failed to keep the irritation out of her voice, and Tara the scepticism out of hers.

"Law school? You're serious about that?"

"Yeah. So we got a deal or not?"

Tara gave her a hard stare, but she nodded and Alex went back in to pack.

Because old habits really do die hard, Alex had kept a few things hidden around the apartment that Dylan didn't know about, and she retrieved them now, tucking them into pockets of a bag along with the most comfortable, practical clothing she owned and whatever essentials she thought she'd need. Copying Tara's outfit, she dressed quickly in jeans, a shirt and boots, feeling like she was slipping back into her old life far, far too easily. So she snuck one of Dylan's plaid shirts, too, so she could feel a little like he was with her on the trip.

Dylan came into the room quietly to stand behind her.

"So you're taking off? Is this about your Dad? Is he alright?"

Precisely the sort of conversation she didn't want to have with her man.

"You know, just a little family drama," Alex replied, trying to sound dismissive. But Dylan knew her too well, despite all the stuff he had no idea about.

She'd told him her father was an alcoholic who didn't approve of her abandoning her family to go to college, and that her sister had sided with him against Alex, which was mostly true. Just, you know missing out a few details.

"Your sister said he was on some kind of a hunting trip?" Dylan persisted.

"Yeah, he's just deer hunting up at the cabin and he's probably got Jim, Jack, and Jose along with him. Tara and I'll go bring him back."

Alex hated lying to him when he trusted her so much, but she couldn't tell him the truth, she couldn't.

"What about the interview?" Dylan asked and Alex felt her stomach twist with tension.

"I'll make the interview. This is only for a couple of days."

Didn't know if she was trying to convince him or herself. Zipped the bag closed and went to walk out the door, but Dylan caught her by the shoulders, concern radiating out from him.

"Lex, please, just stop for a second. You sure you're okay?"

"I'm fine."

She tried to smile in a carefree manner, but didn't fool him for a second.

"It's just…you won't even talk about your family and now you're taking off in the middle of the night to spend the weekend with them? And with Monday coming up which is a huge deal for you, babe."

Alex shouldered the bag and reached up to put her arms around his neck.

"I know it sounds crazy, but everything's gonna be okay. And I'll be back in time. I promise."

She kissed him goodbye, and then she walked out the door to join her sister.


	2. Chapter 2

**2.**

While the Winchester sisters were having their little reunion at Stanford, Tracy Lewis was arguing with her boyfriend on her cell phone, while driving down a certain two-lane blacktop outside of Jericho, California.

"Dan, I can't come over tonight; I got work in the morning. I miss it; my boss'll have my ass."

Unlike the Winchesters, Tracy had no idea that something evil was stalking this road, had been since she was a little kid, and when she saw the young man waving at her from the side of the road, she took pity and pulled over.

"Hey…uh…Dan, let me call you back."

She hung up, switching off the radio in the car as it started flickering into static in an irritating manner and stopping in front of the guy.

"You okay buddy? Car trouble or something?"

"Take me home?" the guy asked, and Tracy thought he was sort of cute, looking all vulnerable and scared to be out alone.

"Sure, get in. Where do you live?"

The man smiled at her in a way that almost made Tracy forget about Dan.

Screw Dan, anyway. He'd been getting boring anyway.

"At the end of Breckenridge Road," he replied.

Tracy looked him over a bit more closely; he was wearing a billowing white shirt that had lit up under her headlights like a beacon and similarly loose white trousers, which was, um, kind of unusual.

"You coming from a Halloween party or something? You know, you really shouldn't be alone out here."

The guy was looking out the window with an almost wistful expression, turned to fix Tracy with a very direct look, one she was more used to seeing on the faces of guys who tried to pick her up in bars.

"I'm with you. Do you like me?"

Tracy grinned, liking where she thought this was going.

"Uh-huh."

"Come home with me?"

Tracy's grin got a little wider.

"Hell, yeah.

It didn't take long to reach Breckenridge Road, and soon Tracy had pulled over by a boarded up house. Intent on the cute guy she was with, she hadn't noticed the state of it until they stopped.

"Come on, you don't live here."

The man was staring at the house intently.

"I can never go home," he whispered and Tracy began to get a bit freaked out.

"What are you talking about? Nobody even lives here."

Tracy peered more closely at the house, which was most definitely abandoned and showing signs of fire damage. Hell, it was barely standing.

"Where do you really live?"

But when she turned back to the guy, he'd vanished. Great.

Tracy got out of her car and headed for the house. Just in case he was genuinely crazy, she couldn't leave him out here in the middle of the night.

"Joke's over, okay? You want me to leave?"

The second she got to the front door, there was an explosion of bats from the house and Tracy's freakout went into overdrive. Man, she hated bats.

Legging it back to the car, she drove off, guy or no guy. This was getting too weird.

She made it back to the Highway before glancing in the rearview mirror and practically had a heart attack when she saw the guy sitting in the backseat, staring at her like a movie psycho.

Tracy screamed, slamming on the brake, but too late, she'd taken her eye off the road and she swerved straight through a barrier, stopping on Sylvania Bridge.

Somehow, impossibly, the man had moved from the back of the car to the front and by then it was too late to do anything more but scream.

It was mid-morning, and the sisters had stopped for gas.

While Tara was inside, Alex amused herself by flipping through Tara's music collection. Not that she'd really expected her sister to have changed in two years, but really?

Tara dropped back into the driver's seat, dumping a bag of snacks and juice onto Alex's lap.

"Hey, you want breakfast?"

"No thanks. So how'd you pay for that stuff? You and Dad still running credit card scams?"

Tara was utterly unabashed at her sister's disapproving tone.

"Yep. Hunting ain't exactly a pro-ball career, Lex. Besides, all we do is apply, it's not our fault they send us the cards."

Alex snorted.

"Yeah and what names did you write on the application this time?"

Tara wrinkled her nose, trying to remember which of the many aliases she was supposed to be using this time, sticking the Impala into gear and heading off.

"Uh…Bert Aframian and his daughter, Hilda. Scored two cards out of the deal."

"Sounds about right. I swear, girl; you gotta update your cassette-tape collection."

"Why?"

That was a genuine question; Tara seemed almost offended that Alex had raised the issue.

"Well for one they are cassette tapes, and it's the 21st Century. Two - Black Sabbath? Motorhead? Metallica? All you need now is a denim waistcoat and a mullet and you're ready to go."

Tara leaned over and snatched a tape out of Alex's hand, slamming it into the player and cranking up the volume.

Alex's heart sank as she recognised the opening bars of Metallica's Black Album.

She'd kind of liked 'Enter Sandman', once upon a time, but then her father and sister had played it so many times it was like it had drilled its way into her head and was eating her brain.

"House rules, Lexie," Tara sang out, clearly loving the moment.

"Driver picks the music, shotgun shuts her cake hole."

"Lexie? I haven't answered to Lexie since I was in pigtails. It's Alex, okay?"

Tara refused to recognise Alex's annoyance, or perhaps she was enjoying it too much. "Sorry, I can't hear you. Music's too loud."

Alex rested her head against the window in despair. If there was one thing she'd managed to forget successfully since starting her own life, it was that she'd rather face a horde of angry demons than be trapped in a car with her sister while she was trying to keep up with James Hetfield. Tara could do a great many things, but singing wasn't one of them.

And if there was one thing Alex could admit to in public that her family had killed off within her, it was classic rock. Years and years of pretty much nothing else would do that to a person, especially when they refused to allow you any musical taste of your own. She remembered when Tara had found the Death Cab For Cutie album Alex had bought (alright, shoplifted; she'd done things she wasn't proud of, okay?) and ribbed her about it for months.

The Impala sped past a sign proclaiming that Jericho was seven miles away. Those seven miles couldn't pass quickly enough for Alex.

As they headed into town, Alex made a few calls, ending with some vaguely comforting news.

"Alright, so there's no one matching Dad at the hospital or morgue, so that's something, I guess."

"Check it out," Tara replied, indicating the number of police cars and other interested parties that were parked up on a closed-down bridge.

"Looks like there's been another one."

Pulling up, she grabbed the box of fake IDs out from the glove box, taking out two and handing one to Alex.

"Let's go."

There were a couple of cops standing by the incident line, yelling down to their colleagues below.

"Find anything?" One called out.

"No, nothing!" came the reply from below as the sisters took in the car stopped at an angle in the middle of the bridge. Another cop was peering into it.

"No sign of struggle, no footprints, no fingerprints. Spotless, it's almost too clean."

"So this girl Tracy, she's dating your son, right?" the first cop asked him.

"Yeah."

He didn't sound too pleased to admit that.

"How's Dan doing?"

"Putting up missing posters downtown," was the terse reply, and Tara took the opportunity to cut in.

"You fellas had another one just like this last month, didn't you?"

The cops swivelled to take her in, a tall, long-legged striking girl with black hair reaching past her shoulders. Tara didn't often wear make-up (apart from that time in her teens, Alex remembered, when she'd gone through a phase of wearing so much eyeliner she looked like she had two permanent black eyes, which she hadn't taken kindly to people pointing out), didn't need to with such startling green eyes and cheekbones you could slice carrots on. Not that the shorter, curvier Alex noted, of course, although she did note that Tara was wearing her 'pool hustling jeans' that pulled in tight around her ass and acted as a more than adequate distraction when she was trying to put guys off their game and make off with their money. Alex wasn't proud to admit she'd done a similar thing, when money was short, with low cut tops and high heels; there were times when being a D cup came in handy, even if it wasn't terribly feminist to do so and did cause rows with your sister if it got you any attention from guys she was trying to pick up.

"Who the hell are you?" one of the cops asked, suspicion radiating out from him. The rather conspicuous Impala parked behind them probably didn't help either – by itself a head-turner, when driven by two young women, it tended to draw more attention than was useful. But Alex knew that Tara would cut her own arm off – hell, both arms and more, probably - before she drove anything else.

Tara flipped open the wallet with the fake ID, giving the guy the 'don't mess with me' look she'd perfected from, oh, about age five. Alex followed suit, although she knew there was no point pulling a similar face. Being a voluptuous blue-eyed blonde made it a little more difficult to give that impression, especially next to Tara.

"Federal Marshals."

The cops continued to eye them with distrust.

"You two are a little young for Marshals, aren't you?"

"Thanks, that's awfully kind of you," Tara snarked, giving him a sharp smile.

"You did have another one just like this, correct?"

For whatever reason, the cops decided to buy their story, at least to a certain degree.

"Yeah, about a mile up the road. There have been others before that."

Alex decided it was time for a little good cop, bad cop. Or rather, kick-ass Federal Marshal, smart Federal Marshal.

"So this victim, you knew her?"

The cop nodded

"Town like this, everybody knows everybody."

Tara headed to the car, looking it over with a professional eye.

"Any connections between the victims besides that they're all female?"

"No, not so far as we can tell," the man admitted.

"So… what's the theory?" Alex asked, joining her sister by the car.

"Honestly?" the cop replied.

"We don't know. Serial murder? Kidnapping ring? Suicide Pact?"

"Well, that's exactly the kind of crack police work that I'd expect out of you guys," was Tara's astonishingly helpful reply.

Alex could have punched her. But there were people watching, and they were supposed to be Feds, after all, so she settled for kicking Tara really hard on the ankle instead, seeing as the car was blocking the cops' view of their feet.

"Thank you for your time, gentlemen."

She dragged Tara off, and her sister barely waited until they'd gotten off the bridge, before smacking Alex upside the head.

"Ow! What was that for?"

"Why did you have to kick me?" Tara demanded, indignant.

"Wow, I don't know! Why do you have to talk to cops like that?" Alex snapped back.

"Come on. They don't really know what's going on. We're all alone on this. I mean if we're gonna find Dad then we've gotta get to the bottom of this thing ourselves."

As Tara reached the end of her diatribe, Alex noted the town Sheriff and two men in FBI jackets arriving behind her sister, clearing her throat to draw Tara's attention to it.

"Can I help you ladies?" the Sheriff asked, his tone making it clear he did not want his time wasted.

"No sir, we were just leaving," Tara relied, giving him a thousand wattage smile.

"Agent Mulder, Agent Scully."

The two investigators remained impassive as the sisters beat a hasty retreat to the Impala.

Deciding the best bet would be to try and find the 'Dan' they'd overheard the cops mentioning, the sisters headed downtown to find the guy hanging 'Missing' posters. He wasn't too hard to locate, and soon they were approaching him.

"You must be Dan."

"Yeah," the guy replied, and Tara was slightly annoyed he didn't so much as check either of them out. He was sort of cute, if you didn't mind overlooking the reddened eyes from recent crying.

"Tracy told us about you," she continued.

"We're her cousins. I'm Tara, this is Lexie."

Alex shot her sister a venomous glare at her continued usage of her childhood nickname, but Tara didn't even notice.

Dan didn't look convinced.

"She never mentioned you to me."

"Well that's Tracy, I guess. We're not around much; we're up in Modesto. So we're looking for her too, and we're kind of asking around."

A girl came up to Dan, carrying a bunch of the same 'Missing' posters.

"You okay, Dan?"

"Yeah. These are Tracy's cousins. They're looking for her too."

The girl looked them over, eyes narrowing in suspicion, but she said nothing.

"Do you mind if we ask you both a couple of questions?" Alex asked, and Dan nodded.

"Tell us what happened? Whatever you know."

"Okay… I was on the phone with Tracy the night she disappeared. She was driving home, and she said she would call me right back. She never did."

"She didn't say anything strange or out of the ordinary?" Alex asked, and Dan shook his head.

"No, nothing I can remember."

He was fiddling with a charm around his neck, and Alex recognised it as a pentagram.

"Nice necklace."

"Thanks. Actually, Tracy gave it to me. She bought it to scare her parents with all that devil stuff and I sort of ended up with it."

Tara touched the amulet around her own neck almost superstitiously, and Alex couldn't help but smile. She had literally never seen Tara not wearing it from the moment Alex had given it to her; for all Alex knew, Tara showered and slept with it on. Alex wondered whether Tara had continued wearing it after Alex had left for college, seeing as how they hadn't parted on the best of terms. Decided not to think about that.

"Actually, it means just the opposite. A pentagram is protection against evil, really powerful."

She caught Tara giving her a hard stare, and hastily backpedalled.

"I mean, if you believe in that kind of thing."

"Okay, thank you 'Unsolved Mysteries'," her sister interrupted, sarcasm dripping off her tone.

"Here's the deal – the way Tracy disappeared - something's not right. So if you've heard anything…"

Dan and his friend, who hadn't told them her name, exchanged a glance.

"What?"

"Well," the girl said, hesitantly.

"It's just…with all these girls going missing, people talk."

Interest spiking, both sisters leaned forward.

"What do they talk about?" Tara demanded.

"It's kind of this local legend. This one girl, she got murdered out on Centennial like…decades ago. Supposedly she's still out there. She hitchhikes, and whoever picks her up… Well, they disappear forever."

It wasn't a great deal to go on, but it was more than they'd gotten so far so the sisters headed for the local library to research that option further.

According to the _Jericho Herald_ web page, there were no Hitchhiking Murders, or Centennial Highway murders when Tara ran searches.

Losing patience, Alex leaned over and tried to grab the mouse.

"Let me have a go."

Tara smacked her hand away, insisting she could do it, but Alex retaliated by simply pushing away the chair on wheels Tara was sitting on and scooting into her place.

Tara was not best pleased; she'd gotten used to working on her own.

"You're such a control freak, girl."

Alex ignored her.

"Angry spirits are born out of violent death, right?"

"Yeah."

"Doesn't have to be murder. And just 'cos the urban legend says it's a girl, doesn't mean it is."

Adjusting the search parameters, Alex quickly found a likely candidate.

"So in 1981. Joseph Welch, 26 years old, jumps off Sylvania Bridge and drowns in the river."

Tara, not seeing the connection, asked why he did it. Alex read on.

"A day earlier, there was a fire at the Welch's house, with wife Constance and their two kids inside. All three died. According to Constance's sister, he'd told her he couldn't bear to go on living without them."

Tara leaned in closer, staring at the picture that accompanied the article.

"That bridge look familiar to you?"

It did – they'd been there only hours earlier.

"Too much to be a coincidence, don't you think?"

They left it until dark before going back.

"So this is where Joseph took the swan dive," Tara remarked, her flashlight playing over the scene.

Alex cut right to the chase.

"So you think Dad would've been here?"

Tara shrugged.

"Well, he's chasing the same story and we're chasing him."

"So now what?"

"Now we keep digging till we find him," Tara replied.

"Might take a while."

"T, I told you, I've gotta get back by-"

"Monday. Right, the interview."

Tara didn't sound at all concerned. In fact, she sounded disapproving, didn't think her baby sister had her priorities right at all.

"You're really serious about this aren't you? You think you're just gonna become some lawyer? Marry your guy and become a soccer mom in the suburbs?

"Maybe," Alex replied, defensive. It was pretty much what she wanted, yes.

Albeit a soccer mom with a suspicious amount of salt in the kitchen and wards painted on every doorframe of the house. She wasn't stupid.

It certainly beat the idea of doing this forever; Alex had a sudden vision in which she and Tara spent the next ten, fifteen years driving around in the Impala, boyfriends riding in the backseat, she and her sister toting kids on their hips while they went out hunting.

"Why not?"

For some reason, this made Tara even more angry.

"Does Dylan know the truth about you? I mean, does he know about the things you've done?"

"No," Alex snapped back.

"And he's not ever going to know."

That was for damn sure. Maybe years down the line she could confess a few things, but there was no way Dylan was going to get a blow-by-blow account of a Winchester childhood.

"Well, that's healthy," Tara snorted.

"Look, you can pretend all you want, Lexie. But sooner or later you're going to have to face up to the fact that _we're not like other people_. Admit who you really are."

"Oh?" Alex retaliated, annoyed.

"And who is that?"

"One of us."

Tara sounded deadly serious and Alex had to try not to laugh in her face. Thankfully, her underlying anger made that easier.

"No, Tara. I'm not like you. This-"

She gestured around the bridge with her own flashlight, as serious as her sister.

"Is not going to be my life."

Tara folded her arms, staring her little sister down.

"Well, that's pretty selfish of you. You've got a responsibility."

Alex wouldn't have believed what she was hearing if she hadn't had it screamed at her the night she'd left for college. She knew Tara enjoyed many aspects of the hunting life, but she also thought she'd made it clear how she, Alex, felt about that.

"To Dad and his insane crusade?" she asked, incredulous.

"You know, if it weren't for pictures I wouldn't even know what Mom looks like. What difference would it make? Even if we do find the thing that killed her, Mom's gone, and she isn't coming back."

Furious, Tara grabbed hold of the collar of Alex's shirt and threw her up against the pedestrian rail of the bridge, her eyes blazing as Alex hit a sore spot.

"Don't talk about Mom like that!"

Alex didn't move, but a flickering of bright light caught her attention and she turned her head to see a figure, dressed all in white, climb up on the side of the bridge.

"Tara, look!"

Tara let go of Alex and turned just in time to witness the ghostly figure leap from the bridge.

"What the hell?"

Both sisters sprinted over to the spot, but there was no splash to be heard, and no sight of the man.

"What happened?" Tara demanded, but Alex had no reply.

Then, to make a weird situation even more peculiar, the headlights on the Impala suddenly, impossibly, sparked into life, along with the engine.

"What?"

"Who's driving your car?" Alex asked, stupidly.

Wordlessly, Tara pulled the keys from her jacket pocket, just as the car leapt towards them, with no-one behind the wheel, trying to run them down like it was Christine.

Instinct and years of training kicking in, the girls ran for the side of the bridge, desperately trying to get out of the path of the car, which was relentlessly trying to squash them.

Alex managed to grab hold of a railing and hang on until the coast was clear enough to drop back down, glad she'd signed up for the rock climbing club in college to stay in some kind of shape (other than that was where she'd met Dylan, of course). Tara was not so lucky; a missing rail at the point she'd jumped meant she fell though and plunged off the side, landing in the river below.

"Tara!" Alex called out, struggling to catch sight of her sister.

"Tara!"

"Alright, Lexie. I'm here."

Tara was crawling, or rather squelching out of the water, covered from head to foot in mud. Slowly, she made her way back up to the bridge, where the car was now quietly waiting for them.

"Are you alright?"

"Oh yeah, I'm super."

Tara gave the Impala a quick once-over, but there was no trace of damage, or whatever it was the ghost had done to it.

"Seems alright now. Jeez, that Joseph Welch guy might be pretty messed up, but that's no excuse for screwing with a girl's car, hey?"

Alex couldn't help but laugh. Maybe any other woman would be concerned about being coated in slimy river mud, but Tara had concern only for her baby.

Not entirely surprising; it had been the Winchester family car since before they were born, and the closest they'd had to a home for years. It was also pretty much the only thing Tara's father had ever given her, apart from a headful of hunting lore, a bag of hang-ups and a broken arm when she'd screwed up a wrestling move he was trying to teach her.

"He doesn't want us digging around, that's for sure."

Alex wrinkled her nose as a shift in the wind brought the scent of river mud and god knows what else to her and all sisterly concern vanished.

"You smell like a toilet."


	3. Chapter 3

**3.**

After another intolerably long drive – even with all the windows open, the stink in the car following Tara's little dip was pretty unpleasant – the Winchesters found a motel for their budget and went to check in.

Looking Tara up and down, the clerk seemed to decide not to comment on her state when he caught sight of her expression, focussing on the credit card she threw at him.

"You guys having a reunion or something?"

The sisters' ears pricked up.

"What do you mean?"

"That guy, Bert Aframian," the clerk continued.

"He came in and bought out a room for the whole month."

Despite Alex's pleas that she shower and change first, Tara insisted on going straight to the room their father had rented.

"Hold on a little, princess. You are such a girl."

The sisters wasted no further time breaking into the room, which was almost as offensive to the senses as Tara was. Seemed without his daughters around, no clean freaks themselves, John Winchester's habits had slid even further.

Tara and Alex took in the unmade bed, piles of newspapers and a number of clippings pinned to the wall, and Tara went over to the abandoned burger sitting on the desk.

"I don't think he's been here for a couple days, at least," she remarked, wincing at the stench of decay.

Alex noted the windows had been heavily lined with salt.

"Look at this. Salt, cats-eye shells. He was worried. Trying to keep something from coming in."

Tara's eye was caught by a row of missing person's posters, all heavily annotated in red ink under the heading: 'Centennial Highway victims'.

"I don't get it. I mean different women, different ages, ethnicities, jobs. There's always a connection, right? What do these girls have in common?"

Alex skimmed over a couple of other papers, pulling up when she saw one on the opposing wall that listed various different names: _La Llorona, __Kuchisake-onna,__ Woman in White. _

Underneath, in their father's handwriting, was scrawled:

"_Doesn't have to be a woman!"_

Alex laughed out loud.

"Dad figured it out."

Tara came over, leaning over Alex's shoulder.

"What do you mean?"

"He found the same article we did. Joseph Welch, he's the guy equivalent of a Woman in White."

Tara grinned.

"Guess he was listening after all when we used to bitch about how sexist so many legends are. It's always women who go bad and kill men; why shouldn't there be something that happens to a guy?"

Alex smiled back, the memory not as painful as it might have been just a day or so earlier.

"All right, so if we're dealing with a 'man in white'," Tara continued.

"Dad would have found the corpse and destroyed it."

"He might have another weakness," Alex pointed out.

Tara shook her head.

"No, Dad would want to make sure, he'd dig him up. Does it say where he's buried?

Alex scanned over the article again.

"No, not that I can tell. If I were Dad though, I'd go ask Constance's sister."

She tapped the article with a finger at the point where it mentioned her, Faith Hatherley.

"She's the only one still alive."

"Alright, I'm gonna get cleaned up."

Tara indicated the shower, to Alex's immense relief.

"Why don't you see if you can find an address?"

"OK – look, what I said earlier, about Mom and Dad. I'm sorry."

Tara took a step backwards, holding up her hands as if to ward off further words.

"Woah! Hold up on the chick flick moments, little sister. You know how I feel about emoting."

Alex rolled her eyes.

"Alright. Sorry if my oestrogen levels offend you, loser."

"Bitch."

But Tara was laughing as she headed into the shower.

Finding the address didn't take too long, and by the time a thankfully cleaner, sweeter smelling Tara emerged from the bathroom, Alex had what she needed.

"I'm gonna go get something to eat at that diner down the street. I'm starving. You want anything?"

"No thanks."

Alex settled down into the lotus position on the floor. She probably wouldn't get a chance to go through her usual daily yoga practise, but she could squeeze in a little here and there, while her sister was out.

Tara waggled the fraudulent credit card at her sister.

"Aframian's buying."

Alex shook her head, pulling out her cell phone, dialling voicemail to pick up a message from Dylan as Tara went out. Stretching out her spine, her eye fell on a photo stuck to the mirror; her and Tara when they were little, sitting with their father on the hood of the Impala, shot before he'd started taking them with him on hunting missions. Couldn't remember who'd taken it; Pastor John, maybe or their 'uncle' Bobby Singer. She didn't know what made her feel more sad just then, the memories or hearing the sound of Dylan's voice, missing him.

Tara, meanwhile, had barely made it across the parking lot before she spotted the cops they'd encountered on the bridge, talking to the check-in clerk, who immediately pointed her way.

"Oh, this ain't good," she muttered, turning on her heel and pulling out her cell phone to call Alex.

"So come home soon, okay? Love you," Dylan was saying to finish the message, just as Tara's call connected.

"What is it?"

"Lexie, five-o, take off," was her sister's terse response.

"What about you?"

Alex, instantly alarmed, leapt up from her cross-legged position on the floor, gathering up her stuff.

"Uh, they kind of spotted me. Go find Dad," Tara instructed, realising she couldn't get away from the cops now without turning it into a whole OJ situation.

Hanging up, she turned to face the two cops with a dazzling smile.

"Problem, officers?"

The man in front was unamused.

"Where's your partner?"

Tara opened her eyes very wide, all innocent.

"Partner? What partner?"

Out of the corner of her eye, she spotted her sister climb out of an upstairs window of the motel, shin down the fire escape and disappear, which was a small relief.

The cop looked Tara up and down, an expression of distaste on his face.

"So. Fake US Marshal, fake credit cards. You got anything that's real?"

Tara smiled again, enjoying the moment as much as she could in the circumstances.

"My unshakable belief in the American Way?"

Unsurprisingly, the cops failed to see the funny side, and Tara was promptly arrested, soon finding herself sitting in an office at the police station being questioned by a man with even less of a sense of humour. He was rummaging through a box that seemed to contain everything grabbed from her father's motel room.

"So, you want to give us your real name?" the man asked.

"I told you," Tara lied.

"It's Deal. Kim Deal."

The man looked her over disapprovingly.

"I'm not sure you realize just how much trouble you're in here, girl. You got the faces of ten missing persons taped to your wall. Along with a whole lot of satanic mumbo jumbo. You are officially a suspect, and being a smartass ain't helping."

Tara stared back at him, right into his eyes in a way that made the man pretty uncomfortable.

"That makes sense. Cause when the first one went missing in '82, I was three."

The man was persistent, she gave him that.

"I know you got partners; one of them, the guy who rented out that room, he's older. Maybe he started the whole thing. So tell me…Tara."

Tara jumped ever so slightly, but it was enough to give the cop what he wanted, leaving her cursing inside. He pulled a leather bound book out of the box and dropped it down in front of her.

"I thought that might be your name. This is his, right? See, I leafed through this, what little I could make out. I mean, it's nine kinds of crazy. But I found this, too."

Tara stared at the book, one she recognised all too well but was determined not to give any more info away. Scribbled on one page, in large letters, read:

'Tara 35-111.'

"Now, you're staying right here till you tell me exactly what the hell that means."

Tara, who had no intention of doing any such damn thing, stared at her father's journal, trying to figure out what to do next.

Being the resourceful girl she was, Alex had little trouble tracking down Faith Hatherley and was soon showing her the picture of her Dad.

"Yeah, that's the guy; he came by three or four days ago. Said he was a reporter."

Alex nodded.

"That's right. We're working on a story together; I'm fact checking."

Faith, a hard-eyed woman in her late forties, gave Alex a look.

"I don't know what the hell kind of story you're working on. The questions he asked me."

"About your sister, Constance? How she and her family died?"

"Yeah. He asked me where they were buried."

"And where is that again?" Alex risked asking.

"What, I got to go through all this twice?"

The woman was clearly not best pleased to be raking over old painful memories again, but Alex persisted.

"If you don't mind."

"In a plot behind what's left of the old family home, over on Breckenridge."

"Mrs Hatherley, did your sister and her husband have a happy marriage?"

Faith shrugged.

"She said so. But I never took to Joe, and he knew that."

"Any particular reason?"

"He was the jealous type. Didn't like Connie having too many friends, talking to other men that much."

Alex absorbed that information.

"Did you have any reason to suspect he might have hurt your sister?"

Faith Hatherley's look became even more penetrating.

"You been talking to the cops? Because none of them ever took what I told them seriously back then so I don't know why they'd start now."

"What do you mean?"

"Like I said, Joe was the jealous type. Every now and then he'd get an idea in his head that she was seeing another man, even though Connie only ever had eyes for him. I thought he might have killed her, yes."

"But the police didn't believe that?"

"They didn't care. Joe'd already killed himself by then, so what difference did it make? Not like they could charge him with anything."

Alex wasn't surprised at the woman's bitterness. She and her own sister had their, um, difficult patches, but if someone hurt Tara, killed her… she wouldn't let that lie, not for anything.

Taking a deep breath, Alex changed her approach.

"Mrs Hatherley, you ever hear of a woman or a man in white?"

"No. What is that?"

"It's a ghost story. Well, several ghost stories really, urban legends. Um, they're spirits. Used to be called a woman in white, or sometimes a weeping woman but it can be a man too. They've been sited for hundreds of years. Dozens of places; in Hawaii and Mexico, Japan. Lately in Arizona and Indiana. All these are different people, you understand. But all share the same story."

"Girl, I don't have much time for nonsense," Faith cut in, but Alex pressed on regardless.

"You see, when they were alive, they suffered unfaithful partners, or thought that they did."

Faith opened her mouth to comment but Alex ploughed on.

"And these people, they killed their partners, sometimes they murdered their children too. Then once they realized what they had done, they took their own lives. So now their spirits are, well, cursed. Walking back roads, waterways, and if they find an unfaithful man or woman, they kill them, and they're never seen or heard from again. Not even a body."

Faith sat down very suddenly, eyes wide, a hand over her mouth.

"Those people going missing, those girls... you think Joe has something to do with that? His ghost, acting out because he though Connie was cheating on him?"

Alex nodded, her expression grave.

"It's possible."

Back in the police station, Tara was running out of patience, and so was the cop interviewing her.

"I don't know how many times I gotta tell you. That number's my high-school locker combo."

"Are we gonna do this all night long?" the man demanded, and Tara started to believe that they just might when another cop stuck his head in through the door.

"We just got a 911," he informed his colleague.

"Shots fired over at Whiteford Road."

The man interviewing Tara got to his feet, looking down at her.

"Do you have to go to the bathroom?"

Suspicious, Tara went for honesty.

"No."

"Good."

Clearly enjoying himself, the man snapped a handcuff around Tara's wrist and attached the other end to the desk, before going out and leaving her there.

Pissed off, Tara waited for just long enough for him to leave the station, before pulling a paper clip off a page of her father's journal and expertly picking the lock on the handcuff. Within a few minutes, she was out the window, onto the fire escape and heading out of the station grounds, her father's journal tucked safely inside the bag swinging from her shoulder.

As soon as she'd gotten a safe distance away, she found a phone box and called Alex.

"Fake 911 phone call? Well, Alexis May Winchester, that's pretty illegal."

"You're welcome, Tara Grace," her sister replied, a smile in her voice. From the background noises, Tara figured she was driving. She'd better be careful; any damage to the Impala would be repaid in kind and Lexie better damn well know that.

"Listen, we gotta talk."

"Tell me about it," Alex replied.

"So Joe Welch was convinced his wife had been unfaithful, killed her and the kids, then himself; we are dealing with a Man in White. They're buried behind their old house. So that should have been Dad's next stop; I just can't figure out why he hasn't destroyed the corpse yet."

"Alex, would you shut up for a second? That's what I'm trying to tell you. He's gone. Dad left Jericho."

"What?"

The shock in Alex's voice was clear.

"How do you know?"

"I've got his journal," was Tara's flat reply.

"He doesn't go anywhere without that," Alex said slowly, trying to figure it out.

"What's it say?"

"Same old ex-marine crap when he wants to let us know where he's going."

The second she'd seen those numbers, that was all Tara could think of, even more so than the job in hand, the Hunt. If their Dad could just take off like that, then something was seriously wrong.

"Co-ordinates," Alex said.

"Where to?"

"I'm not sure yet."

"I don't understand, Tara, what the hell is going on? Whoa!"

"Alex?" Tara called out, as the sound of her sister's voice was replaced by a series of worrying scuffling noises.

"_Alex_!"


	4. Chapter 4

**4.**

Alex slammed on the brakes, dropping her phone as she tried to avoid knocking down the man who'd appeared so suddenly in front of the car. But instead of colliding with him, he vanished, as suddenly as he'd arrived, and Alex had a horrible feeling she didn't want to look in the rearview mirror.

A voice whispered in her ear.

"Take me home."

Alex kept her eyes locked straight ahead, her hands on the steering wheel.

"No."

"Take me home!" the ghostly voice insisted, and the doors clicked locked without anyone touching them. Trying not to panic, Alex tried to unlock the doors, wanting nothing more right then than to get out the damn car, but it only got worse as the car, apparently all by itself, moved into gear and leapt forward, even though Alex's foot wasn't on the pedal.

Desperately trying to wrench the wheel, Alex struggled against a car that was being driven by a homicidal ghost, eventually giving up and trying to kick the door open, anything to get out. But nothing worked, and all too soon, the Impala and its unwilling passenger had pulled up outside the boarded up house at the end of Breckenridge Road. The car engine shut off, but the doors remained locked.

"Don't do this," Alex tried to appeal to whatever humanity might be left inside, but the ghost ignored this, jumping into the passenger seat, trying to grab her.

"I can never go home," he hissed, the same voice she'd heard on her father's voicemail message.

"You're scared to go home!" Alex realised, trying all she could to avoid his touch in a confined space. Damn it, there was no way she was going to let herself get killed by a jealous spirit in her sister's car.

The ghost of Joseph Welch did not respond well to this, leaping on top of Alex, trying to pin her down.

"Hold me. I'm so cold."

Just his voice sent shivers down Alex's spine, and she tried to fight him all she could.

"You can't kill me. I'm not unfaithful. I've never been," she insisted, thinking as hard as she could about Dylan, how much she wanted to be at home with him right then.

But it made no difference. Joseph Welch's ghost just grinned a horrible, translucent grin, shoving his face right up against hers.

"You will be."

And he kissed her.

Cold; he might as well have been made of ice… Arms flailing, Alex tried to reach the keys in the ignition, but Joseph's image was flickering as he metamorphosed in front of her, his face melting into that of a monster instead of a formerly attractive young man, his hands turning to claws that ripped at Alex's jacket.

Alex screamed as he rent the cloth, cutting through to skin below, panic setting in so that all she could think was _nonononono._

The sound of gunshot snapped her out of her panic, and gave her the leeway she needed to shove Joseph off her. She couldn't see Tara, but she knew her sister was there, repeatedly shooting at the ghost with her handgun.

Alex twisted the keys in the ignition, kicking the car into life and shoving it into gear.

"I'm taking you home."

And she floored the accelerator, leaping forward through the dilapidated wall of the abandoned house. The fire damage made this easier, but it was still a hell of a jolt and it left Alex dazed.

Tara raced into the house after the car, calling for her sister.

"Alex! You okay?"

"Uh, I think."

Tara pulled her out of the car, glancing up to see Joseph pick up a picture of himself and his family, the family he had murdered in a jealous rage. If she'd hoped that rage would have dissipated in twenty-four years, she was wrong.

The sisters had barely found their feet when, face contorting with fury and hate, Joseph flung the picture to the ground and shoved the burnt remains of a dresser at them telekinetically, pinning Tara and Alex against the side of the Impala.

The Winchesters struggled to move it, to free themselves but to no avail. Strange lights flared up around them, a mixture of the fused electrics reacting to the ghostly presence and the memories of the fire that had burned Constance and her children.

And then those three figures themselves appeared at the top of the smoke-blackened stairs and Joseph froze in horror, watching them come closer and closer.

There was a flickering and suddenly the three were stood right in front of him, holding hands, facing their murderer, and Alex and Tara saw it wasn't the fire that had killed them after all. The children's clothing was splattered with their blood, spilled when their father had cut their throats in their sleep. The front of Constance's dress was almost black from where her husband had stabbed her, again and again, in a moment of fury and madness.

"Look children," Constance said, her voice soft and deceptively gentle.

"Your Daddy's come home to us."

Trapped as they were, Alex and Tara could only watch as Constance reached out a hand to touch her husband's face and with a scream, Joseph burned, the way his family had burned in the fire he had set, until there was nothing left. Then she and her children vanished too and the house was quiet again.

Now it was no longer held by a furious ghost, the girls had no trouble shoving away the dresser.

"So he did kill them," Tara remarked, staring at the scorch mark on the floor where Joseph's ghost had burned.

"That's why he could never go home. He was too scared to face them. Nice work, Lexie. You found his weak spot."

Alex started laughing, even though it hurt to do so.

"I wish I could say the same for you. What were you thinking shooting Casper in the face, you freak?"

"Hey, saved your ass, didn't it?" Tara threw back.

"I'll tell you another thing. If you screwed up my car, I'll kill you."

And she started lifting broken pieces of house off her baby, with more care, Alex thought, than she would have done had it been Alex herself lying underneath them.

Job done, the sisters decided to skip town as fast as they could, before the police could try and track them down. Sitting in the passenger seat, Alex pulled out a map and tracked down the coordinates 35-111.

"Okay here's where Dad went. It's called Blackwater Ridge, Colorado."

"Oh, sounds charming," Tara replied.

"How far?"

"About 600 miles."

"Okay. If we haul ass we can make it by morning."

Alex glanced over at her sister.

"Um, Tara…"

"You're not coming."

Tara's voice was flat.

"The interview's in ten hours," Alex pointed out, not wanting to get into an argument but also not giving in.

"I've got to be there. It's important."

Tara just nodded curtly, clearly thinking that her definition of important was somewhat different to her sister's.

"Yeah, whatever. I'll take you home."

It was late by the time they got back to Alex and Dylan's apartment. Grabbing her bag off the backseat, Alex hesitated.

"Call me when you find him?"

Tara nodded, still having difficulty meeting her sister's eyes, not wanting to start a fight by saying what she was thinking.

"Maybe I can meet up with you later, huh?" Alex asked, and Tara shrugged.

"Maybe."

Closing the door, Alex turned to go inside, but Tara called her back.

"Yeah?"

"You know we made a hell of a team back there."

"Yeah. I know."

Tara watched her little sister close the door to the apartment block behind her, intending to drive off right away, but found she wanted to stay, just to make sure Alex was okay. Didn't know if she genuinely had a bad feeling or just that it had felt good, right even, having her sister by her side again and Tara didn't want to be on her own again just yet.

The apartment was quiet and dark so Alex called out for her boyfriend, knowing he would have waited up for her.

"Dylan! You up, babe?"

She wandered through the kitchen, where a note was propped up on a plate of cookies, (no doubt baked by their friend Lucy, who made damn fine cookies).

"_Missed you! Love you!"_ the note read and it made Alex smile.

She took a cookie, nibbling on it as she headed for the bedroom. The shower was running and Alex's smile grew wider as she thought of surprising Dylan when he got out the shower.

Dropping down on the bed, Alex closed her eyes, starting to relax for what felt like the first time all weekend.

A drop of water landed on her forehead, followed by another and Alex opened her eyes in annoyance. Now, of all times, for the roof to spring a leak?

It wasn't water.

Wasn't coming from the roof.

Dylan was pinned to the ceiling, impossibly so, his blood dripping down onto the bed from where his stomach had been slashed open and Alex couldn't tell if he was already dead, even before he slowly burst into flames.

"No! Dylan!"

Lingering outside, Tara heard Alex scream and in all her years of hunting she'd never heard sounds of such utter despair as those coming from her little sister.

Sprinting to the apartment, Tara kicked in the door, calling her sister's name.

Alex was still on the bed, eyes pointed upwards, unable to tear herself away from the terrible sight of the love of her life burning in front of her.

"Dylan! No!"

"Alex!"

Grabbing Alex, Tara tried her hardest to pull her out of the room, and not to look up. Anything that made her sister scream like that, Tara didn't want to see.

"Come on, girl. We gotta get out of here!"

"_NO!"_

Resisting temptation to just slug Alex and carry her out, Tara managed to get her on her feet and drag to the door, seconds before the whole room erupted into fire.

Tara felt the heat from the flames lick against her back as she threw Alex down the stairs, towards the comparative safety of the street, where neighbours were starting to wake up and call the emergency services.

Tara sat down, putting her arm around Alex, now shocked into silence, staring at the apartment as it burned away, taking with it everything from the life she'd built for herself here. There was nothing Tara could say, and she knew that, so she sat there and she held onto Alex until the firefighters got there.

It didn't take long, and the fire was quickly contained; all neighbours got out unharmed and Alex had gotten up by then, moving away before the police could be pointed her way.

Tara went to find her; she was standing at the back of the car, and she was loading a gun she'd taken out of the trunk, expertly. Without a word, Tara went over and stood next to her sister, putting down the travelling bag she'd grabbed from Alex's apartment at the last second.

For a moment, she didn't react, then Alex looked over at her and Tara had never seen a look like that on her sister's face before. Would have done anything to be able to take that pain away from her, anything at all.

Alex had tried her hardest to make a life for herself, away from hunting, but it had caught up with her eventually, as perhaps she'd always known it would. And now Dylan was dead, seemingly killed by the same thing that had killed their mother. There was only one thing she could do, and it wasn't here.

Alex threw the loaded gun into the trunk.

"Okay. We got work to do."

And just like that, the sisters got into the car, and they drove away.

**Disclaimer**: Hmm, tough one. Technically, none of this belongs to me, but I like to think I could lay some claim to Tara and Alex.

And to give credit where credit's due, I used the transcript of the pilot from twiztv as a basis for this.

And I refuse to use the 'shag ass' line because to me as a Brit, shag means 'have sex' and that changes the meaning of that sentence entirely. And I'm not writing Wincest-sisters.

- So, what do you think? Pointless? Biggest waste of time ever? Or an interesting sideways look at the show? Let me know – but be nice?


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